Research Article
The Effect of Characters’ Locomotion on Audience Perception of Crowd Animation
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-95531-1_27, author={Wenyu Zhang and Nicoletta Adamo-Villani}, title={The Effect of Characters’ Locomotion on Audience Perception of Crowd Animation}, proceedings={ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation. Creative Heritage. New Perspectives from Media Arts and Artificial Intelligence. 10th EAI International Conference, ArtsIT 2021, Virtual Event, December 2-3, 2021, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={ARTSIT}, year={2022}, month={2}, keywords={Crowd animation Virtual character Perception}, doi={10.1007/978-3-030-95531-1_27} }- Wenyu Zhang
Nicoletta Adamo-Villani
Year: 2022
The Effect of Characters’ Locomotion on Audience Perception of Crowd Animation
ARTSIT
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95531-1_27
Abstract
A common practice in crowd animation is the use of human templates. A human template is a 3D character defined by its mesh, skeletal structure, materials, and textures. A crowd simulation is created by repeatedly instantiating a small set of human templates. For each instance, one texture is randomly chosen from the template’s available texture set, and color and shape variety techniques are applied so that multiple instances of the same template appear different [1]. When dealing with very large crowds, it is inevitable to end up with instances that are exactly identical to other instances, as the number of different textures and shape modifications is limited. This poses a problem for crowd animation, as the viewers’ perception of identical characters could significantly decrease the believability of the crowd simulation. A variety of factors could affect viewers’ perception of identical characters, including crowd size, distance of the characters from the camera, background, movement, lighting conditions, etc. The study reported in this paper examines the extent to which the type of locomotion of the crowd characters affects the viewer’s ability to perceive identical instances within a medium size crowd (20 characters). The experiment included 83 participants and compared the time participants took to spot identical characters in three different locomotion scenarios (e.g., standing, walking, and running). Findings show that the type of locomotion did not have a statistically significant effect on the time subjects took to identify identical characters within the crowd.
